


Field Below

by justholdstill



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-17 01:16:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11840940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justholdstill/pseuds/justholdstill
Summary: Somewhere behind him the world has juddered to a stop and begun again, but he knows none of it. When he comes back to himself, it's to the clacking heartbeat of a train with no memory of the station, to the softly falling snow slipping past the grimy compartment windows, and the vague notion that he's got somewhere to be.





	Field Below

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2007, pretty much right after Deathly Hallows came out & I finished bawling my eyes out over "Always".
> 
> Because everyone else took care of the others and their afterlives, and because I thought it only right that Snape should speak his piece too. Title borrowed from the Regina Spektor song of the same name.

  
**Field Below**

Toward another  
he has gone   
to breathe an air  
beyond his own  
toward a wisdom  
beyond the shelf  
toward a dream  
that dreams itself...

...from a chaos   
raging sweet  
from the deep  
and dismal street  
toward another  
kind of peace  
toward the great  
emptiness

\- Patti Smith, from _About A Boy_  


He wakes up, and his left forearm is smooth and cool and clean. They're not kidding when they say you can't take it with you.

Somewhere behind him the world has juddered to a stop and begun again, but he knows none of it. When he comes back to himself, it's to the clacking heartbeat of a train with no memory of the station, to the softly falling snow slipping past the grimy compartment windows, and the vague notion that he's got somewhere to be. 

*

"You recognize this place."

"Of course. How could I not?" The one towering smokestack needling the sky, the labyrinth of brick and mortar, an almost-forgotten dusty brown lane running parallel to the murky river - Spinner's End. 

*

His mother loves ironing - she hates doing any other chore the Muggle way because his father insists on it, but she seems to love the dance of this one mundane task, the repetitive back-and-forth motion to the percussive hiss of steam, loves the warmth of the flannel shirts she holds close to her body as she slides them on the hangers. He's five years old and he knows all of this even though she never says anything to him, because she gets a happy gleam in her eyes and puts the kettle on for tea, and seats him at the narrow table in the narrow kitchen with one of her old spellbooks and a wooden spoon for practice. 

Years later he knows the poem - _a thing of beauty is a joy forever_ -, and this is his mother - "that's right, Severus, swish _and_ flick" - as he remembers her ever after, bony bare feet shuffling in a lazy foxtrot, humming tunelessy, spinning on the spot. Her grey wool skirt twists thickly around her legs as she moves, in time to the naked rhythm of the song on the tinny old wireless (this is also the day, he remembers, when he first realised that songs had _words_ , and _meaning_ ), and so different is she from her sardonic melancholic self, made to be not a housewife, his Mum, but a formidable potions researcher, that long moments pass before he can recognise her again. 

Until outside a car door slams, and the deep voices of men come traipsing to them through the dusk. "Put that away now, Severus," she says, and when he looks at her face some of the lightness and ease is gone, "your father's home." He climbs down from his chair and puts the spoon back into the glass jar by the stove, runs up the stairs to his bedroom to replace the book on his shelf. 

By the time the shouting starts he's down in a stand of rushes past a field near the river, cupping duck eggs still warm from the mother in the bowl of his two thin white hands. He doesn't know it yet (so many things he doesn't know), but four of them will hatch and one of them won't, and a sixth he will break on a later day, dropping it on the hot cobblestones trying to bring it home to show her.

*

In the dark of his memory there is the ruin of a village, all the old bones of a town that was, where the air is still acrid with the black of burned timbers sodden with late rain. Sounds echo there which have no resonance in time or reason - the theremin hum of ancient curses, the copper song of blood spilled. "Each of us is a place as well as a person," she says, coming to stand beside him, "a history as well as a future. This is yours." This is his. He almost forgets to look at her, seen for so long only in dreams, so that when he does it is hard to look away, hard to wonder how she came to be there when he'd been disappointed only a moment ago that she wasn't, when he'd thought that if she'd be anywhere in a world cracked wide open, she'd be here. It's the thought that lets him touch her face, a caress that she allows, twenty-three, beautiful, and laughing, like the last time he saw her alive.

"Lily." 

He smoked when he was twenty-two and stopped when he was twenty-six; that last time he met her with a cigarette in his mouth, wreathed in the blue-white smoke as an armour. Now there is nothing between her and him, nothing to sting his eyes, or to make her wrinkle her nose and turn away. "Tell me, Sev," she says, leaning into him with a sly grin, "do you still wank over me?" Watching with delight as he grimaces, but knowing that he has always answered her with the truth.

"Always." On her hand the ghost of a ring glints, and something tugs at his recollection. "I'm afraid I haven't been as kind to your son as I might have been." A pause. "He was too much like his father for my taste."

"In looks, maybe. But he couldn't help it, Severus."

"Perhaps not....but you could have."

"Stop it. I didn't come here to argue with you." 

"Did you come on your own, or were you sent?" A breath.

"Neither. You dreamed me here."

"Is that how this place works?"

"Isn't that how it always has?"

*

And a small wooden boat that bobs on the waves under a crescent-blade moon and a meteor shower, moving of its own volition. That castle glittering at shore where his life began, or ended, or both.   
Thinking of magic now, the improbability of it, a lot that had been cast for him. He'd been waiting eleven years for the chance to come here, to be given a place and a wand and taught what his world had to show him, things that his mother has only whispered about the few times she'd tucked him into bed, cryptic stories hinting at possibilities that kept him wide-eyed and fascinated in the night.

Nearby, they've set his body under a grassy mound and marked the spot with a round granite slab, a last (and only) monument to an invented hero. 

 

*

At one point he passes by an old man with a trailing white beard and silver robes, but this is one of the mercies than heaven grants - the ability to turn away. He's made his bed and lain in it, and whatever approximation of sleep the afterlife offers gives up visions of milky thighs and arms and shoulders, soft bellies and and wiser eyes and sweeter mouths than his. Saltwater washes over him; snow covers him. When he closes his eyes he no longer knows anything of sherbet lemons or badly given advice.

(He no longer knows anything.)

*

Jostling him in his seat, the train rattles through the low-set hills, rumbling steadily and wailing out the kind of song only machines can sing.

Distantly there are the spires and rooftops of a cloud-built city that never seem to disappear from view no matter how long he looks. The tracks that skim against the dividing line of an iron sky and a marble sea which is always changing, shifting colours under the peculiar fragile sun that is heaven's light. A heaven indiscernable from the Scottish coast.


End file.
